research-article

Public Access

Persistent Clocks for Batteryless Sensing Devices

Authors:

Lanny Sitanayah,

Daniel Holcomb,

Wayne P. Burleson,

Jacob SorberAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), Volume 15, Issue 4

Article No.: 77, Pages 1 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/2903140

Published: 02 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Sensing platforms are becoming batteryless to enable the vision of the Internet of Things, where trillions of devices collect data, interact with each other, and interact with people. However, these batteryless sensing platforms—that rely purely on energy harvesting—are rarely able to maintain a sense of time after a power failure. This makes working with sensor data that is time sensitive especially difficult. We propose two novel, zero-power timekeepers that use remanence decay to measure the time elapsed between power failures. Our approaches compute the elapsed time from the amount of decay of a capacitive device, either on-chip Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) or a dedicated capacitor. This enables hourglass-like timers that give intermittently powered sensing devices a persistent sense of time. Our evaluation shows that applications using either timekeeper can keep time accurately through power failures as long as 45s with low overhead.

References

[1]

2011. An Introduction to the Architecture of Moo 1.0. (May 2011). https://spqr.cs.umass.edu/moo/Documents/Moo_01242011.pdf.

[2]

Abracon Real time clock 2015. Abracon Corporation AB08X5 Real-Time Clock Family. (2015). Retrieved December 10, 2015 from http://abracon.com/Precisiontiming/AB08X5-RTC.PDF.

[3]

Ross Anderson and Markus Kuhn. 1996. Tamper resistance: A cautionary note. In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce.

Digital Library

[4]

Gildas Avoine. 2012. Personal communication on French passports. (2012).

[5]

Gildas Avoine, Kassem Kalach, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater. 2008. ePassport: Securing international contacts with contactless chips. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Gene Tsudik (Ed.). Springer-Verlag, 141--155.

Digital Library

[6]

Steve Bono. 2012. Personal communication. (February 2012).

[7]

Stephen C. Bono, Matthew Green, Adam Stubblefield, Ari Juels, Aviel D. Rubin, and Michael Szydlo. 2005. Security analysis of a cryptographically-enabled RFID device. In Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Security Symposium.

Digital Library

[8]

Isidor Buchmann. 2001. Batteries in a Portable World. Cadex Electronics Richmond.

[9]

Michael Buettner, Ben Greenstein, David Wetherall, and Joshua R. Smith. 2008. Revisiting smart dust with RFID sensor networks. In Proceedings of ACM HotNets 2008.

[10]

Tom Chothia and Vitaliy Smirnov. 2010. A traceability attack against e-passports. In 14th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer.

Digital Library

[11]

Ahmad H. Dehwah, Mustafa Mousa, and Christian G. Claudel. 2015. Lessons learned on solar powered wireless sensor network deployments in urban, desert environments. Ad Hoc Networks 28 (2015), 52--67.

Digital Library

[12]

Conrad Donovan, Alim Dewan, Deukhyoun Heo, and Haluk Beyenal. 2008. Batteryless, wireless sensor powered by a sediment microbial fuel cell. Environmental Science & Technology 42, 22 (2008), 8591--8596.

[13]

EPCglobal. 2012. EPC Radio-Frequency Identity Protocols Class-1 Generation-2 UHF RFID Protocol for Communication at 860 MHZ--960 MHZ, Version 1.2.0.

[14]

Krisztián Flautner, Nam Sung Kim, Steve Martin, David Blaauw, and Trevor Mudge. 2002. Drowsy caches: Simple techniques for reducing leakage power. In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 148--157.

Digital Library

[15]

Saurabh Ganeriwal, Srdjan Čapkun, Chih-Chieh Han, and Mani B. Srivastava. 2005. Secure time synchronization service for sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Wireless Security (WiSe’05). 97--106.

Digital Library

[16]

Flavio D. Garcia, P. van Rossum, R. Verdult, and R. W. Schreur. 2009. Wirelessly pickpocketing a MIFARE classic card. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 3--15.

Digital Library

[17]

Ian Goldberg and Marc Bricenco. 1999. GSM cloning. (1999). Retrieved February 19, 2012 from http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/gsm-faq.html.

[18]

Jorge Guajardo, Sandeep S. Kumar, Geert-Jan Schrijen, and Pim Tuyls. 2007. FPGA intrinsic PUFs and their use for IP protection. In Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES). 86--80.

Digital Library

[19]

Peter Gutmann. 1996. Secure deletion of data from magnetic and solid-state memory. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Security Symposium.

Digital Library

[20]

Josiah Hester, Timothy Scott, and Jacob Sorber. 2014. Ekho: Realistic and repeatable experimentation for tiny energy-harvesting sensors. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys’14). ACM, New York, NY, 330--331.

Digital Library

[21]

Josiah Hester, Lanny Sitanayah, and Jacob Sorber. 2015. Tragedy of the Coulombs: Federating energy storage for tiny, intermittently-powered sensors. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys’15). ACM, New York, NY, 5--16.

Digital Library

[22]

Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin, Dan V. Bailey, Kevin Fu, Ari Juels, and Tom O’Hare. 2007. Vulnerabilities in first-generation RFID-enabled credit cards. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4886. 2--14.

Digital Library

[23]

Daniel E. Holcomb, Wayne P. Burleson, and K. Fu. 2009. Power-up SRAM state as an identifying fingerprint and source of true random numbers. IEEE Transactions on Computers 58, 9 (2009), 1198--1210.

Digital Library

[24]

Daniel E. Holcomb, Amir Rahmati, Mastooreh Salajegheh, Wayne P. Burleson, and Kevin Fu. 2012. DRV-fingerprinting: Using data retention voltage of SRAM cells for chip identification. In RFIDSec’12: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues. Springer-Verlag. https://spqr.eecs.umich.edu/papers/holcomb-rfidsec12.pdf.

Digital Library

[25]

Ari Juels. 2005. Minimalist cryptography for low-cost RFID tags (extended abstract). In Security in Communication Networks, Carlo Blundo and Stelvio Cimato (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3352. Springer, 149--164.

Digital Library

[26]

Ari Juels. 2006. RFID security and privacy: A research survey. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 24, 2 (February 2006), 381--394.

Digital Library

[27]

Joseph M. Kahn, Randy Katz, and Kristofer Pister. 1999. Next century challenges: Mobile networking for “smart dust”. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’99). ACM, New York, NY, 271--278.

Digital Library

[28]

Daniel Hsing Po Kang, Mengjun Chen, and Oladele A. Ogunseitan. 2013. Potential environmental and human health impacts of rechargeable lithium batteries in electronic waste. Environmental Science & Technology 47, 10 (2013), 5495--5503.

[29]

Leslie Lamport. 1978. Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Communications of the ACM 21, 7 (1978), 558--565.

Digital Library

[30]

Dominique Larcher and Jean-Marie Tarascon. 2015. Towards greener and more sustainable batteries for electrical energy storage. Nature Chemistry 7, 1 (Jan. 2015), 19--29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2085

[31]

Yu-Shiang Lin, Dennis Sylvester, and David Blaauw. 2007. A sub-pW timer using gate leakage for ultra low-power sub-Hz monitoring systems. Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (2007).

[32]

Wenbo Mao. 2001. Timed-release cryptography. In Selected Areas in Cryptography VIII (SAC’01). Prentice Hall, 342--357.

Digital Library

[33]

Masateru Minami, Takashi Morito, and Hiroyuki Morikawa. 2005. Biscuit: A battery-less wireless sensor network system for environmental monitoring applications. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Networked Sensing Systems. Citeseer.

[34]

Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, and Donald Wilson. 1963. Doctor Who. (November 1963). Premiered on British Broadcasting Channel One.

[35]

NXP Semiconductors MIFARE Classic. 2012. NXP Semiconductors MIFARE Classic. (2012). Retrieved February 18, 2012 from http://www.nxp.com/products/identification_and_security/smart_card_ics/mifare_smart_card_ics/mifare_classic/.

[36]

NXP Semiconductors SPI Real time clock/calendar. 2012. NXP Semiconductors SPI Real time clock/calendar. (2012) Retrieved February 18, 2012 from http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/PCF2123.pdf.

[37]

Inc. Omega Engineering. 2007. OSXL450 Infrared Non-Contact Thermometer Manual.

[38]

Yossef Oren and Adi Shamir. 2007. Remote password extraction from RFID tags. IEEE Transactions on Computers 56, 9 (Sept. 2007), 1292--1296.

Digital Library

[39]

David Oswald and Christof Paar. 2011. Breaking MIFARE DESFire MF3ICD40: Power analysis and templates in the real world. In Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES). 207--222.

Digital Library

[40]

Hulfang Qin, Yu Cao, D Markovic, A. Vladimirescu, and J. Rabaey. 2004. SRAM leakage suppression by minimizing standby supply voltage. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design. 55--60.

Digital Library

[41]

Amir Rahmati, Mastooreh Salajegheh, Dan Holcomb, Jacob Sorber, Wayne P. Burleson, and Kevin Fu. 2012. TARDIS: Time and remanence decay in SRAM to implement secure protocols on embedded devices without clocks. In 21st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 12), 221--236. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical-sessions/presentation/rahmati.

Digital Library

[42]

Murugavel Raju. 2000. UltraLow Power RC Timer Implementation Using MSP430. Texas Instruments Application Report SLAA119.

[43]

Damith C. Ranasinghe, Roberto L. Shinmoto Torres, Alanson P. Sample, Joshua R. Smith, Keith Hill, and Renuka Visvanathan. 2012. Towards falls prevention: A wearable wireless and battery-less sensing and automatic identification tag for real time monitoring of human movements. In 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC). 6402--6405.

[44]

Benjamin Ransford, Shane Clark, Mastooreh Salajegheh, and Kevin Fu. 2008. Getting things done on computational RFIDs with energy-aware checkpointing and voltage-aware scheduling. In USENIX Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower’08).

Digital Library

[45]

Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and David A. Wagner. 1996. Time-Lock Puzzles and Timed-Release Crypto. Technical Report. Cambridge, MA.

Digital Library

[46]

Ludovic Rousseau. 2001. Secure time in a portable device. In Gemplus Developer Conference.

[47]

Alanson P. Sample, Daniel J. Yeager, Pauline S. Powledge, Alexander V. Mamishev, and Joshua R. Smith. 2008. Design of an RFID-based battery-free programmable sensing platform. IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement 57, 11 (Nov. 2008), 2608--2615.

[48]

Nitesh Saxena and Jonathan Voris. 2009. We can remember it for you wholesale: Implications of data remanence on the use of RAM for true random number generation on RFID tags. In Proceedings of the Conference on RFID Security.

[49]

Sergei Skorobogatov. 2002. Low Temperature Data Remanence in Static RAM. Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-536. University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

[50]

Kun Sun, Peng Ning, and Cliff Wang. 2006. TinySeRSync: Secure and resilient time synchronization in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’06). 264--277.

Digital Library

[51]

Sun Electronic Systems Inc. 2011. Model EC1X Environmental Chamber User and Repair Manual.

[52]

Richard M. Swanson and James D. Meindl. 1972. Ion-implanted complementary MOS transistors in low-voltage circuits. International Solid-State Circuits Conference (May 1972).

[53]

Robert Szewczyk, Joseph Polastre, Alan Mainwaring, and David Culler. 2004. Lessons from a sensor network expedition. In Wireless Sensor Networks, Holger Karl, Adam Wolisz, and Andreas Willig (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2920. Springer, Berlin, 307--322.

[54]

Russell Tessier, David Jasinski, Atul Maheshwari, Aiyappan Natarajan, Weifeng Xu, and Wayne Burleson. 2005. An energy-aware active smart card. IEEE Transaction on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2005).

Digital Library

[55]

Texas Instruments Inc. 2011. MSP430F21x1 Mixed Signal Microcontroller. Texas Instruments Application Report SLAS439F (revised Aug. 2011).

[56]

ThingMagic Inc. 2007. Mercury 4/MERCURY 5 User Guide.

[57]

Tim Tuan, Tom Strader, and Steve Trimberger. 2007. Analysis of data remanence in a 90nm FPGA. Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.

[58]

Stefan Van Der Walt, S. Chris Colbert, and Gael Varoquaux. 2011. The numpy array: A structure for efficient numerical computation. Computing in Science & Engineering 13, 2 (2011), 22--30.

Digital Library

[59]

Vishay. 2008. HPC0402B/C - High Performance, High Precision Wire-Bondable 0402 Capacitor for Smartcard, High-Frequency and Substrate-Embedded Applications. http://www.vishay.com/docs/10120/hpc0402b.pdf.

[60]

Eric Vittoz. 1994. Low-power design: Ways to approach the limits. International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

[61]

Daniel Yeager, Fan Zhang, Azin Zarrasvand, Nicole T. George, Thomas Daniel, and Brian P. Otis. 2010. A 9 μA, addressable gen2 sensor tag for biosignal acquisition. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 45, 10 (Oct. 2010), 2198--2209.

[62]

Xianlai Zeng, Lixia Zheng, Henghua Xie, Bin Lu, Kai Xia, Kuoming Chao, Weidong Li, Jianxin Yang, Szuyin Lin, and Jinhui Li. 2012. Current status and future perspective of waste printed circuit boards recycling. Procedia Environmental Sciences 16 (2012), 590--597.

[63]

Hong Zhang, Jeremy Gummeson, Benjamin Ransford, and Kevin Fu. 2011. Moo: A Batteryless Computational RFID and Sensing Platform. Technical Report UM-CS-2011-020. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA.

Cited By

Josephson C(2025)Unlocking Sustainable and Scalable Sensing Systems at the Far EdgeGetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications10.1145/3714983.371499128:4(19-26)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3714983.3714991
Williams HAhmad SHicks MBagchi SZhang Y(2024)A difference worldProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692066(1223-1238)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691992.3692066
Geissdoerfer KZimmerling MShu YLiu JTan RHe YChen J(2024)Riotee: An Open-source Hardware and Software Platform for the Battery-free Internet of ThingsProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699332(198-210)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3666025.3699332
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Persistent Clocks for Batteryless Sensing Devices
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
    1. Reliability
  2. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Embedded hardware
2. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
    1. Embedded systems security

Recommendations

Timely Execution on Intermittently Powered Batteryless Sensors
SenSys '17: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems

Tiny intermittently powered computers can monitor objects in hard to reach places maintenance free for decades by leaving batteries behind and surviving off energy harvested from the environment--- avoiding the cost of replacing and disposing of ...
The Future of Sensing is Batteryless, Intermittent, and Awesome
SenSys '17: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems

Sensing has been obsessed with delivering on the "smart dust" vision outlined decades ago, where trillions of tiny invisible computers support daily life, infrastructure, and humanity in general. Batteries are the single greatest threat to this vision ...
Can Crystal Oscillators Keep Time Without Power?
ENSsys '20: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems

Accurate timekeeping is a critical challenge for many intermittently-powered computing devices. Current approaches to keeping time across power failures provide either limited resolution or require additional hardware. We would like to introduce one ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 15, Issue 4

Special Issue on ESWEEK2015 and Regular Papers

August 2016

411 pages

ISSN:1539-9087

EISSN:1558-3465

DOI:10.1145/2982215

Editor:
Sandeep K. Shukla
Indian Institute of Technology, India

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Journal Family

ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Published: 02 August 2016

Accepted: 01 March 2016

Revised: 01 December 2015

Received: 01 May 2015

Published in TECS Volume 15, Issue 4

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

SRC task
Sloan Research Fellowship
NSF
Gigascale Systems Research Center

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

61
Total Citations
View Citations
1,072
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)208
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)29

Reflects downloads up to 28 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Josephson C(2025)Unlocking Sustainable and Scalable Sensing Systems at the Far EdgeGetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications10.1145/3714983.371499128:4(19-26)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3714983.3714991
Williams HAhmad SHicks MBagchi SZhang Y(2024)A difference worldProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692066(1223-1238)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691992.3692066
Geissdoerfer KZimmerling MShu YLiu JTan RHe YChen J(2024)Riotee: An Open-source Hardware and Software Platform for the Battery-free Internet of ThingsProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699332(198-210)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3666025.3699332
Babatunde SAlsubhi AHester JSorber J(2024)Greentooth: Robust and Energy Efficient Wireless Networking for Batteryless DevicesACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/364922120:3(1-31)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649221
Narayanan VGanesan DLane NShi W(2024)Back From The Dead: Enabling Timely Computation and Communication in Batteryless Intermittently-powered Sensor NodesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3697461(1689-1691)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3636534.3697461
Choi JChoi JJoe HJung C(2024)Caphammer: Exploiting Capacitor Vulnerability of Energy Harvesting SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344687943:11(3804-3815)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3446879
Zhang ZLiu CKim H(2024)MII: A Multifaceted Framework for Intermittence-Aware Inference and SchedulingIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344371043:11(3708-3719)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3443710
Xuan LLin CYen TChen YHsu C(2024)FASE: Energy Isolation Framework for Latency-Sensitive Applications in Intermittent Systems With Multiple PeripheralsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.331819943:2(456-467)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCAD.2023.3318199
Nasrullah AAnwar F(2024)HAEST: Harvesting Ambient Events to Synchronize Time across Heterogeneous IoT Devices2024 IEEE 30th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)10.1109/RTAS61025.2024.00029(265-279)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS61025.2024.00029
Wymore MSahu RRuminski TDeep VAmbourn MLing GNarayanan VAsiedu WQiao DDuwe H(2024)Lure: A simulator for networks of batteryless intermittent nodesPerformance Evaluation10.1016/j.peva.2024.102440(102440)Online publication date: Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peva.2024.102440
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents